There is something about children at play in Thailand that takes me back to when I was a kid.  Rural Thailand for children isn’t much different than when I was growing up in the States during the late sixties/early 70′s. There weren’t computers or cable TV and our parents didn’t have a lot of money to buy us all the toys we wanted, but we made do. We would spend hours playing with card board boxes, wrapping paper tubes and string that became forts, swords and bows. We had the best toy of them all, our imaginations.

All the kids I have seen playing n rural Thailand have pretty much the same imagination and can play for hours with some paper and a few small toys. Their counterparts in the west are already getting fat watching TV, playing on computers and their favorite gaming system.

It seems to me that the children of Thailand are quite a bit more healthy than their counterparts in the West in more than a few ways. It will be interesting to see where these children are in 20 years compared to the children of the West. The rural Thai children may not have all the advantages that a child growing up in the west does but they aren’t too bothered by what they don’t have.

It seems with all the new technology we are making our children lazier in the West while at the same time putting much more stress on them. The children of my generation had it good and did just fine without all the gadgets kids have today. We were more social, less careful and definitely more thoughtful. Sure, we did stupid things and have the scars to show for it but we were living or lives, not wasting time in front of a screen.

Hopefully their imaginations stay with them and they help to build a better Thailand one paper airplane at a time while considering the plight of those poor disadvantaged children in the West who are coming to the conclusion that one to many Twinkies and too many video games haven’t done much to help them in life. The bigger hope is that they can remain children as long as possible before having to take on the responsibility of family, as all Thai children do much sooner than they should.